WURs routinely show that China has ten universities in the Top 100 while India has none. But there are dangers of imitating China. India has higher levels of dissent and that’s important – writes Shiv Visvanathan

Contemporary news headlines often produce a standard Pavlovian response. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) demonstrated how dogs, fed for some time at the ring of a lab bell, would salivate regardless of whether food was served. Many latter day media headlines evoke a similar response.

Media headlines relating to the QS, THE and other WUR (World University Rankings) also elicit a similar response. The WURs routinely show that China has ten universities in the Top 100 while India has none. Publication of the WURs immediately provokes outrage, concern and mourning. Wailing walls spring up across the country: the Chinese are far ahead of us. But let us put on our thinking caps, and as argumentative Indians let’s examine the WURs.

We don’t need experts to tell us our universities are in bad shape. Even the best struggle with the economics of scarcity. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a leading French scientist at Bengaluru’s Raman Institute. He admitted that the Chinese are productive whether it is astronomy or genetics. They assemble large Stakhanovite teams to pursue a programme. The papers that emerge are competent with multiple authorships. India is different, he said, gifted with both anarchy and inefficiency. However, Indian science is playful, still free while Chinese science is dismal. According to him, in India, the traditions of Raman and Krishnan are still alive. Indian science is not an unthinking juggernaut. Science, he argued, is a value, a framework of meaning. That’s alive in India.

In this context, there are dangers of imitating China. Freedom and science are intertwined. This is not a narrow liberal belief but an issue of democratic imagination. India has higher levels of dissent and that’s important. One can go to a university in China and confront sheer silence about Mao’s cultural revolution. Even survivors of that era will pretend it never happened. WURs don’t measure dissent and freedom. The league tables don’t reflect absence of Anthropocene or anti-nuclear movement in China’s academy.

An anthropologist friend queries the obsession with productivity in WURs which don’t accord importance to the diversity of problems confronting universities. At a recent conference on education at a Jesuit college in Bengaluru, a proposition to secede from Scopus ratings on academic grounds received considerable support. It was argued that Scopus as a standardised frame of knowledge needs revision. The anthropologist claimed that to upgrade our universities, we must begin with pockets of excellence and seed them further. He called for an Opus strategy of creativity as opposed to the Scopus banality of productivity. When science is in doubt and solutions are plural, Chinese universities won’t be ranked nearly as high. Their silence over the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic which started spreading from Wuhan, China, provides a perfect example of the culture of conformity and obedience which is antithetical to the spirit of enquiry and debate which underpins high-quality research. Instead of promoting mediocrity through tutorial college science, India, he said, should be the spearhead of an alternative imagination of higher education.

This point is repeatedly raised in forums debating science and technology. It’s patently clear that Chinese science lacks democracy. It has little respect for dissent as it steamrolls towards mainstream objectives. The activist felt we need to upgrade science, research and the academy but not in the direction of China or of the Kasturirangan Committee report. We need to reread nature, rebuild diversity and carefully define expertise. Recently as I was passing through Mylapore, Chennai, I traversed down a Kasturirangan Road. It proved to be a dead end, symbolic perhaps of the committee’s 484-page report.

Of course there’s need to debate teaching, research and excellence in higher education. But despite the rising popularity of private universities, it’s important for government to seed education. But the State has to understand the difference between science and technology. The Modi government has no sense of the difference between a rocket launch and a basic science programme. Thus under its education management, Bengaluru is becoming less of a science and more technology — and duller — city. The joy and playfulness of science is getting lost in bureaucratic technology.

The best response came from a philosopher friend who avers that bad news is often good news because it prompts rethinking of fundamentals. Why respect WURs that force universities into mediocrity? “Dump Scopus and WURs because they are Olympiads of mediocrity,” he advises. Instead, he recommends playful competition with China, and ideating an alternative imagination of teaching-learning and research. It is time, he says, for India to “outthink China”. In my opinion, he reads WUR headlines with real understanding. It is time we start dreaming and organising differently.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a member of Compost Heap, an academic think tank, and well-known columnist)